Datta Dayadhvam Damyata Shantih Shantih Shantih

The Experience Vault

There is, out there on the internet, a place where people have anonymously recorded their experiences with recreational drug use for everything from caffeine to meth.

I stumbled across it about two years ago when I was double-checking the interactions with one of my newer medications (i.e. could I take Tramadol with Benadryl). Even now when I go to double-check a pharmaceutical side effect that page occasionally pops up.

And I can’t help but read it. And then I get mad. And then I read it again.

I’ve been trying very hard lately to avoid having pity parties for myself because they just aren’t productive. All that happens is that you spend your wheels in the poor-me mud for fifteen minutes and then there you are, fifteen minutes poorer and grumpy to boot. But I have been having a really difficult time lately avoiding the outrage I feel at what seems like others wasting good health on stupidity.

It’s so very not libertarian of me. So very not judge-not-lest of me. I’d honestly say it’s one of the traits I need to work on the most, and I suppose that’s why I’m admitting here. Hello, my name is Katherine and I’m filled with anger at recreational drug users.

I understand addicts. I really do. But in my mind an addict is someone with a health problem not unlike mine. So while some of the trappings of addiction, like the urge to make heroes out of those who are in rehab, annoy me I don’t really get enraged at addicts. I feel bad for them.

But these recreational drug users, like the kinds over on this website I’m mentioning, they burn me up. You read their stories and they go into great detail about taking six or seven times the basic dose of a medication that people like me take to survive. And they take it “just to see what happens” or to make the Cartoon Network seem funnier or NPR seem deeper. They talk about going into mindless trances for days while they coccoon in the pillowy bliss of their high. They talk about the sick grandmothers and neighbours and aunts they’ve stolen the pills from and the friends who take them to the hospital when they go into a drooling seizure in front of the television.

It makes me so very angry, these people who have health and time and energy and some level of wits about them. These gifts they don’t even see as gifts, the precious things they carelessly discard as they break relationships to tickle their mind.

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4 Responses

I think the vast majority of folks don’t appreciate what an absolute blessing good health is until they lose it. Or at least until someone very, very close to them loses it. I don’t always appreciate my good fortune with my own health, and I should darn well know better, with all the people I love that are struggling with their health and the health issues I do have.

Erowid has always been a bizarre place to me, too. I ran across it in the same way you did, looking to see if 2 drugs I was on interacted. I looked at it with more of a horrified fascination though.

I would beg to differ. These people are not healthy. Healthy people don’t take drugs to tickle their minds. They have mental health issues. And at some point, bodily health will become an issue, too. That’s how I console myself when I’m mocked by perfectly healthy people for trying to feed my children a pure diet. My children have health problems, and I’m working on making theirs better. Their children may not, but even the best of us wear our bodies out if we feed it nothing but crap. Or as Usher once said to Justin Bieber, you won’t be 16 forever.😉

I used to be a pretty regular user of various illegal recreational drugs, and yet I managed not to steal (money or medication) from anyone, vandalize public or private property, drive or operate heavy machinery while under the influence, lose a job, or flunk out of school. I am still a regular consumer of alcohol, another recreational drug, but legal. None of it seems to have hurt my body, either. The question is not whether people use stuff — it’s how and when and how much and what they do with it, and what they take away from the experience.

Of course, the author of this essay has completely mischaracterized the majority of recreational drug users. No, we’re not stealing from our helpless grandmothers and filling up the ERs. We smoke pot in high school and college, maybe take a dose of ecstasy at a concert, or try LSD a few times. Then we get older, either turn to our careers or our relationships or just coast for a while. In the end, hopefully we’ve had a couple experiences that made us feel truly comfortable in our bodies and connected to those around us.

As for myself, trying ketamine, cocaine, and ecstasy when I was younger taught me about the limitations of my body at both extremes: the high and the low. I’m better off for it. I now work as an analyst in one of the biggest banks in the US. I’m perfectly healthy, and as for maturity, probably above that of my peers who never had the full pleasure of their bodies when they were young.

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